Opera hopes to push fast engine envelope with 10.5 preview

Opera boldly catapulted a pre-alpha version of its latest browser onto the interwebs yesterday, for brave testers to tinker with over the holiday season. The Norwegian firm said the rough-round-the-edges preview of Opera 10.5 was now available for download on Windows and Mac machines. A Unix/Linux build won't be available for …

[Patrick O'Reilly]

Impressed

Got to play around with 10.5 yesterday and was very impressed, not only has the javascript engine improved the whole user experience seems faster, the only thing holding up page load was my crap DSL.

Opera has released "labs" builds previously with features that are absent from this and production builds, such as HTML5 video and the W3C GeoLocation API. Video was removed from this build at the last mintue due the developer responsible being on holiday.

Opera 10.5 looks very promising.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pre Alpha???

FFS.....

Is this the New Open Source (TM)

Here is my new super programme. Let me know what your think

! This is going to be great.

If you guys can come back, maybe add some code and features and highlight issues, be great. Thanks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh?

What on earth are you talking about? Open source? No, Opera is not OS.

[MarkOne]

Blisteringly fast

Opera was pretty darn fast anyway, but now it kills Firefox in Javascript benchmarks, and even faster than Chrome V4 (by about 500ms).

The best browser just got better. It's still crashtastic (a mix of fantastic and crashy), and only for the brave right now, but give it a couple of months, and i'm sure it will be fit for a more wider audience...

[James O'Brien]

"and a new graphics library named Vega"

Please tell me im not the only one who read Vega as Viagra?

Oh I was?

And here I was thinking I finally figured out how they manage to make money.

[Antidisestablishmentarianist]

Not the only one....

letters

[Raymond Cranfill]

You're not alone

No, you're not the only one!

[windywoo]

very nice.

I see that they too, like Firefox are experimenting with the Office 2007 style menu bar.

[lawndart]

Like

I like the idea of the private tab/window.

The question is, for you alpha testers, is it still vunerable to the Flash XSS exploit?

[Charlie Clark]

er, what?

It's pre-alpha with lots of warnings to that effect. Yes, it is flaky but I haven't had it crashing just opening websites. Do you have a particular website in mind?

The cocoa integration on Mac OS is very positive and presumably a lot of work. VEGA replaces QT for rendering on all platforms and already includes hooks for rendering in hardware.

[CC]

Oh CRAP!

Well, as I did earlier, I assumed this would just be more Opera crap....my bad...this thing has got more goodies, snooping around it (aside from it working quite well) like finding nuggets of gold hidden at every turn.

Good stuff this RRRR.

[Anonymous Coward]

very nice

Too bad the linux version is not ready, but it looked so well on the screenshots that I actually rebooted into Win 7 for once.

I must say it looks really good. One of the things I like really much is the new menu embedded into the logo, it helps to save space on my netbook, and allows me to reenable some toolbars again.

P.S., is it just me or is their numbering system a little weird? Why do they first give 10.10, and then 10.5? Obviously 10.10 = 10.1 (well, at least in math, but versioning can be weird; as we know, for microsoft 7 is sometimes equal to 6.1 (I know it's for "compatibility", blah blah, but still)), but then why did they name it 10.10 in the first place?

Anyway, really nice work, I'm waiting for the Linux version..

[David Austin]

Title

I'll pass, thanks - the whole "Whine to the EU about unfair it all is" debarcle from earlier this year left a bad taste.

[Chavdar Ivanov]

Quick benchmark...

SunSpider 0.9 on the same machine (just the totals):

opera 10.5 pre-alpha 724.8

chrome 4.0.266.0 1106.8

firefox 3.5.6 2215.2

ie(320bit) 8.0.7600.16385 10751.6

Last time I checked Opera was substantially slower than Chrome. I guess, the guys from 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway will have their Chrismas cancelled...

IE is pathetic, as expected.

[Deadlock Victim]

and?

And so now it will suck at high speed?